THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO TELL YOU by E. Ethelbert Miller

Alexa Zalopany Casey took this photograph January 30, 2017 facing Henderson Lawn at Virginia Tech, as we gathered to express our support for immigrants and especially our Muslim neighbors, after the Executive Order banning immigration.  Used with permission.

*

In the morning some of us will be missing.
Some of us never came home. Some of us
were rounded up and taken away. Some of
us disappeared. Some of us said nothing.
Some of us said it didn't matter. Some of us
didn't care.

This is how it begins.
It begins slowly like air.
It begins invisible like fear.
It begins like rain before clouds.
It begins when listening is no longer heard.
It begins when blood is red like eyes.
It begins with silence breaks into pieces.

All of us are strangers.
All of us will be taken.
All of us are crying.
All of us are angry.

This is what I wanted to tell you.
This is how it begins.
Every ending begins with someone.
Every beginning begins with us.

We can stop this.
We can stop this now.

This is how it begins.
Not with some of us but with all of us.

This is what I wanted to tell you.
Now tell someone else.

*
My friend poet and literary activist Ethelbert Miller posted his poem this morning on Facebook.  In the spirit of the last line, I share it with his permission.  It brings to my mind not only the immigration bans, but the forced removal of native water protectors and their supporters from the Oceti Sakowin Camp today.  For more information on the forced removal see the Lakota People's Law Project.

Instagram photo posted by the Oceti Sakowin Camp four days ago with the caption, "Today a dump truck tried to run over 3 Water Protectors. The Oceti community addressed it peacefully. The matter was pretty much resolved, but they I guess they thought they would like to show a little bit of force."

Poem: Lucy Lee Shirley's Skirt

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Back then, if they saw us trying to read or write they would take our hands, take our eyes, if they saw us keep doing it, take our lives, and here I was being awarded one of the top literary awards in the country, having come from that land...That’s our spirit – you can kill us, some of us will die and some of us will take the stories of our grandparents to the next generation. I am the living embodiment of that.   

      ~  Nikky Finney on the dedication of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, talking about one of the artifacts, a videotape of her acceptance speech for the National Book Award.

*

Six days after police shoot Keith Lamont Scott claiming he posed a threat,
Zianna Oliphant testifies before her hometown City Council:
It’s a shame that our fathers and mothers are killed, and we 
can’t even see them anymore. It’s a shame
that we have to go to their graveyard and bury them.

Scott's wife has released a video she took
as she yelled at police:
He has no gun.

His sister tells reporters,
He sits in the shade, reads his book
and waits on his kid to get off the bus
He didn’t have no gun, 
he wasn’t messing with nobody.

In the museum on the Mall, hangs that little skirt  
someone carefully sewed
using a whip stitch and natural thread:
fabric linen/cotton blend
patterned with small flowers:
red, purple, tan and blue.
Style typical of the day,
trimmed with a pleated self-fabric ruffle,
piped in blue, gathered into a yellow waistband.

Worn often, Lucy's skirt shows its age
in stains and holes and worn patches
and later alterations.
Her granddaughter Cornelia 
has shared it with us. A Polaroid shows
how once it had a long-sleeved
matching peplum top.

The curator says:
people's ability to continue to love 
is something that I can never quite get over.

Picture Lucy, seven or eight or nine
at dusk on a summer Sunday forty miles south in Loudon County
a century and a half earlier
whirling at the edge of a dirt track
fringed in wild asters.

Zianna, the same age, now, crying at a Charlotte podium.


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Photographer Roger May: Broadening the View of Appalachia

Map from Appalachian Regional Commission via Roger May.

Roger May's new collaboration with other photographers and writers Looking at Appalachia: 50 Years After the War on Poverty.  His definition for the project is the area funded by the Appalachian Regional Commission.  I might quibble with that, as it leaves out Roanoke and includes some areas that aren't exactly in our mountains and valleys.  As Rudy Abramson and my friend Jean Haskell write in their introduction to , the Encyclopedia of Appalachia,

At the beginning, as ever since, the federal map reflected the exigencies of congressional politics as much as economic need, geography, or culture. Many inhabitants of Pennsylvania and New York were surprised to learn that the government in Washington considered them Appalachians, and some were opposed to the very idea. Newly elected New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had taken up a deep interest in the region during his brother’s 1960 presidential campaign, led the effort to make the southern tier counties of his adopted state part of the federal region. Similarly, Mississippi was included largely due to the influence of Representative Jamie Whitten, a powerful member of the House Appropriations Committee. On the other hand, a number of Virginia mountain counties that were Appalachian by any standard except political were left out because their representative, Richard H. Poff, was opposed to the 1965 bill.

But maybe Roger's geographical definition makes sense in that his reference point is the War on Poverty.  He writes in the overview,

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty in the United States and nowhere was this war more photographed than Appalachia. A quick Google image search of “war on poverty” will yield several photographs of President Johnson on the porch of the Fletcher family home in Inez, Kentucky. Many of the War on Poverty photographs, whether intentional or not, became a visual definition of Appalachia. These images have often drawn from the poorest areas and people to gain support for the intended cause, but unjustly came to represent the entirety of the region while simultaneously perpetuating stereotypes. In an attempt to explore the diversity of Appalachia and establish a visual counter point, this project will look at Appalachia fifty years after the declaration of the War on Poverty. Drawing from a diverse population of photographers [and now writers] within the region, this new crowdsourced image archive will serve as a reference that is defined by its people as opposed to political legislation. 

Then again, "as defined by its people" is hardly as defined by ARC funding.

I'm happy to report that Roger has now added a written component:  Notes on Appalachia, to include us writers of prose and poetry, as well as storytellers.

...[W]e’re looking for your notes, thoughts, stories, hopes, dreams, interviews, and more about your section of Appalachia. Due to the incredible generosity of the folks at Field Notes, we have 13 sets of their “County Fair” edition notebooks that we’re itching to get into your hands! Your narratives will provide a rich context to the visual representations of Appalachia that have been submitted to the project. Here's the scoop – one notebook will be mailed to a point of contact in each of the project’s 13 states: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. From there, that person will initiate sharing the memo book throughout the counties in their respective state. When it’s full, the memo books will be returned to Roger May...and new ones will be dispatched....The memo books will be scanned and shared on the project site... and will possibly be included in a print exhibition of the project photographs beginning next year. 

And for my fellow Virginians, here are the photograph from our state as of this evening:

Lauren Pound (of Athens, Ohio) Richlands, Tazewell County
Chris Jackson (of the Eastern Panhandle of WV), Covington, Alleghany County
Joseph Oliver Shay (location not listed) Buena Vista and Glasgow, Rockbridge County
Katie Currid (Staunton, VA) McDowell, Highland County
Jeremy M. Lange (Durham, NC) Patrick County
Pat Jarrett  (Shenandoah Valley of VA)  Lexington, Virginia

I know I'll be writing my state contact (Salvador Barajas) and I hope you will, too.  Here's the list of state contacts (or if one is not listed, consider filling the position.  If you have questions write Roger.  His email is also at that link.

Ethelbert Miller's in his Fifth Inning

Photo of Miller by Shyree Mezick used by permission. Ethelbert Miller (blog, website) gave a reading at Volume II Bookstore September 10th, 2009, after which I interviewed him via email over a couple of  days from 9/30 through 10/1 and wrote this draft.. A version of the interview was slated to appear in 16 Blocks, but never made it, so once I confirmed that I published it today. Ethelbert's poem here, "Hitless and Crying at the Plate" is from April 2009 collection from Curbstone, On Saturdays, I Santana With You. He chairs the board the Institute for Policy Studies and directs the African American Resource Center at Howard University. He has authored of nine books of poetry and two memoirs and edited four anthologies.

~

Do you see yourself as a "cultural worker." Is being a poet and memoirist part of this?

I haven't used the term "cultural worker" to define myself since the early 1980s. Back then I was doing work that placed me in touch with people from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Chile. I saw my poetry and activism being responsible for connecting communities with different cultures and interests. One person I admire, who used this term was singer Bernice Reagon, one of the Freedom Singers and the founder of Sweet Honey In The Rock. When I think of Paul Robeson, I think of the definitive cultural worker. Today I'm more comfortable with the label "Literary Activist." I keep the door open for the words poet and memoirist. I define being a literary activist as working with publishing, promotion and preservation.


So, "cultural workers" connect communities with different cultures and interests...you don't use the term to describe youself anymore, but when you were here in Blacksburg you spoke of going to the Middle East?

I've been fortunate to travel to a number of countries in the Middle East. I have visited Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen and Israel.

Earlier this year I was invited to Abu Dhabi for the release of a collection of my poems (At Night We Are All Black Poets) that had been translated into Arabic. I think it's important to visit Arab nations in order to gain a better understanding of Islam. The major adjustment I've had to make is around issues of gender. I'm concern with the status of women in the Muslim world. I feel that the segregation of people by sex is no different than keeping people apart by race. I can't see a society or nation reaching its full potential unless everyone is treated equally. I'm respectful of cultural differences but I think there are limitations to the tolerance of oppression in its various forms. Lately I've been looking at societies in which "joy" is openly expressed. I feel life is to be celebrated. What type of God would prevent one from dancing?

As a literary activist you're involved with "promotion and preservation" Would you tell us a little about your work on Langston Hughes?

A couple of years ago I was working on a project coordinated by Poets House (in New York). They sent me to a number of public libraries around the country to give lectures on Langston Hughes. It was fun reading Langston's work and sharing it with adults and children. I've always enjoyed his work since it is so accessible to the reader. His book, The Big Sea is a personal favorite. I like the fact that Langston Hughes was a man of letters and he traveled around the world. I've been fortunate to visit some of the same places he went to. It's unfortunate that much of his work represented in American poetry anthologies are from his early years as a writer.The radical Hughes of the 1930s is often not discussed in classrooms. When he was alive he was censored not for his racial work but for his poems that dealt with religion. I think it's important to acknowledge the full career of Langston Hughes. His children books, the work that he translated and the plays he presented on stage, all provide a different perspective of a man who was loved and should be viewed as a literary genius. Hughes should be viewed not just as a black writer but also as an experimental voice in American literature. One can see this in a book like Ask Your Momma.

When you read in Blacksburg you included work by other poets. What's your philosophy behind that...

I read poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and Liam Rector [and] Pablo Neruda. I like to underscore my appreciation for poetry by reading the work of other poets. I also like to show how what I'm attempting to do complements what is already in the canon. I read Liam's work because I want to keep his memory alive. Hopefully good poetry can defy death. There are so many voices the average reader and lover of poetry need to know about. I try to turn my readings into forums of discovery.

When I listened to you read the first anecdote about your father in your first memoir Fathering Words, I was struck by how the cadence still was something like a poem. How is the process of writing memoir different than writing poems.

I define myself first as a poet. I hope that when I sit down to write prose or creative non-fiction I don't leave something behind. I want to infuse the poetic sensibility into everything I do. While writing [the first memoir] Fathering Words, I would read passages aloud for the sound and the taste of it. I wanted to produce a book that people would read and underline a passage, a sentence or two. I wanted the reader to return to my memoir the way a person returns to a poem. The second and third reading becoming a sweater or shawl to keep a person warm.

I didn't do any major revision with Fathering Words. I gave the book to my editor at St. Martin's Press and it was accepted. I don't know if I could have gone back and revised my memoir. I don't think I had the discipline to do that back then. The writing process was much quicker for me. I wrote my first memoir using a computer. Many of my ideas for poems are still written down on paper. Writing poetry is a much slower process for me.


The second memoir, The Fifth Inning often uses baseball as a metaphor.  Can you talk about your relationship with "home plate?"

Baseball is a game that begins and ends at home. You bat. You try to touch all the bases and return home. In The 5th Inning I take the reader into the home I tried to create for my wife and family. I think I failed to provide the type of place my wife would have liked. That's why early in the memoir I describe all the apartments we lived in. Notice at the end of the book, I'm getting ready to leave VCCA and my wife Denise is coming to take me home. It was important to have this type of ending. Memoir is also storytelling. I needed to present the reader with a degree of light after writing what many view as a dark or sad book. I'm reminded of what my friend Julia Galbus mentioned (and I included in the book) about many baseball games ending because of darkness and perhaps a storm. I'm aware of that but I needed to be positive in terms of the importance of home, especially in a spiritual sense.


What did you want to leave with your readers? What did you discover in the process of writing the book.

I wanted to leave the reader aware of his or her own shortcomings. I wanted to make someone who is forty or in their fifties aware of how quickly everything can end. I also wanted people to hit and pitch better in their own lives. Even when I compiled an honest list of the many things I can't do, maybe a reader might stop and do the same thing. I think I've also given the reader a short book. A book that physically can fit into a bag or case. A bullpen book. Something to read as the game of life is played around you. Turn a page and never known if it's your turn. Somewhere a manager beckons to the bullpen - time for you to get ready. Are you ready?

~

Hitless And Crying At The Plate by Ethelbert Miller (For Reetika)

Are you crying? There's no crying in baseball. -Manager Jimmy Dugan to outfielder Evelyn Gardner
in A League of Their Own. 1992.

By the way, you should know that every time
I wear a baseball cap while working, I
Ask John, Guess who I am?
He says, I don't know- who?
I say Ethelbert: - A letter from Reetika Vazirani, July 3, 1991.



STRIKE I.

The year Sammy Sosa
Corked his bat is the year
You took your life. We all felt cheated
You like our hero standing
In the batters box alone.


STRIKE II.

Why do poets
Try to change the rules of the game?
Why is death America's pastime?


STRIKE III.

Sometimes I fear the blues
Is a curveball breaking
Near my head.

On Saturdays, I Santana With You, Curbstone, 2009.

Poet/Scholar Chris Green to Head Appalachian Center at Berea

Photo of Chris Green from his fb page, taken by his wonderful wife (and  preschool teacher and GIS consultant) Jenny Hobson (blog) at Pipestem, WV.  (used by permission)

*

July 1, my friend and fellow poet Chris Green (website, email) becomes the Director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center at Berea College!!

Chris currently is associate prof of English at Marshall University and co-director for the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia (CSEGA). He is the Vice-President (and president-to-be) of the Appalachian Studies Association. By way of disclaimer, Chris edited Coal: A Poetry Anthology,  in which one of my poems appeared, as well as an issue of Wind on work from the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (ditto).

Chris had his  dissertation  published in 2009 by Macmillan as The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism,  in which he looks at the idea of "Anglo equality" and focuses on the work of Jesse Stuart (Man w. a Bull Tongue Plow, James Still (Hounds on the Mountain ), Muriel Rukeyser (U.S. 1 ) and Don West (Clods of Southern Earth ).  I should add that this book won Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Associations's Weatherford Award in 2009 for a work of non-fiction that "best illuminates the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South."   He shared the award that year with KY writer C.E. Morgan for her first novel, All the Living (Farrar, Straus & Giroux--which btw netted Morgan a 2010 Lannan Literary Fellowship and recognition by both the National Book Foundation for the 5 under 35 award and The New Yorker magazine as one of America’s 20 Best Writers Under 40.)

 His book of poems Rushlight  was published by Bottom Dog Press.

Chris is the one who got me involved in OVEC when he invited me to join in the WV Mountaintop Removal Writers tour, along with folks such as Jeff Mann, Katie Sallitt Fallon, Eddy Pendarvis,  Diane Gilliam, Denise Giardina, Irene McKinney, Bob Henry Baber, Laura Treacy Bentley, Sam L. Martin,  Rob Merritt, and Cat Pleska.


BTW, the wonderful Silas House has been serving as interim director and will return to his position athe NEH Chair in Appalachian Studies. Chad Berry, who sent me the announcement of Chris's selection, writes, "Silas has greatly increased student engagement in the Center and brought a number of high-quality programs to Berea."

I'll add some more links later (to pages for the other writers I've mentioned in this post.

Oh, and in case you haven't heard of the Weatherford Award, Chris is in VERY good company.  Fellow winners include If you're still not impressed, other recipients of the Weatherford Award include:

• Denise Giardina (for Storming Heaven 1987 and The Unquiet Earth 1993)
• Rodger Cunningham (for Apples on the Flood: The Southern Mountain Experience)
• Lee Smith (for Fair and Tender Ladies)
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (for Colored People: A Memoir)
• Charles Frazier (for Cold Mountain)
• Homer Hickam, Jr. (for Rocket Boys: A Memoir)
• Ron Rash (for Saints at the River in 2004 and Serena in  2008)
• Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell (as editors for The Encyclopedia of Appalachia)
• Ann Pancake (for Strange as this Weather Has Been)

Special Weatherford awards for a body of work have gone to the likes of  Robert Coles, M.D, Wilma Dykeman,  Jesse Stuart, Harry Caudill, James Still, Harriette Arnow, Cratis Williams, Albert Stewart,  Loyal Jones, Sidney Saylor Farr and Jerry W. Williamson.

Nikki Finney's Remarkable Head Off and Split Takes National Book Award

Affrilachian Poets  member and UK English Department prof  Nikky Finney wins National Book Award for Head Off and Split. I was wowed when I got to hear her read at the  Symposium on Affrilachia  @ UK in March.

In a November 11 interview with WUKY, Finney explains the title of her collection:

When I was a girl, my mom would send me to the fish monger. I would go in, choose the fish, hand it over to him. He would inevitably say, "Head off and split" question mark.

I went back five years ago. The same phrase was said to me. I'd heard it a thousand times. I thought, wow, that's a great metaphor for what we dismiss or cut away or don't want to see. The cold grey eyes, the scales, the fins, and then we're handed over the succulent fish without all those nasty details.

I wanted to bring that in to talk about how, as a culture and a community and a country, that I think we have to stay involved in all the details. We can't hand the fish over and just get it back with the succulent fish. I think we're in a time where we really we have to sort of get our hands in there and do the dirty work and not hand it off to somebody else.

Here's Finney reading some of her poems:

"Left" (pdf of poem)

"Condoleeza Suite"

"My Time Up with You"

"Red Velvet" [about Rosa Parks]

"Dancing with Strom"

And a long reading at the New School (starting @ 12:20) starting with her recounting the story of when Nikki Giovanni came to Tallladega College.

There's  an interview available at Oxford American and one at Poets & Writers for the February-March 2011 issue which you will have to read at the library, if you don't have a copy of the magazine..  The Virginia Festival of the book doesn't have its schedule up yet for March 2012, but announced via facebook that Finney is one of its readers.

Here's her acceptance speech (@16:50)
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18565428  (I couldn't embed because evidently only YouTube works with Blogger.

Appalachia Should Abide

Painterly photo by my friend Wendy Johnston of Athens, WV,  shows Larry Gibson of Kayford, WV (the only time I have seen him without his cap, other than in this photo by Antrim Caskey) as he gazes out the window of the Metro bus police used to transport arrestees to  Anacostia for booking.  To the immediate left, ahead of the window frame,  is Dustin White,  of Charleston, WV, who grew up in the  endangered community of James Creek on Cook Mountain.

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I've always loved the song Peter and Gordon recorded in the 60s, "Land of Oden", about a mountain 10,000 miles high and square:

Once every million years
A little bird comes winging,
Sharpens his beak
And quickly disappears.

And when that mountain,
it wears away
Then, to eternity
will be one single day.

On  September 25  in Washington, DC, I read to folks preparing to rally, march and sit in during the Appalachia Rising protest the following Monday. My poem "Looking Out Over An Abyss in Boone County" includes the line "mountains should abide."

Big Coal has decided against almost-eternity for Central Appalachia. Ours is a war zone. To get at thin seams of coal, Massey and others detonate fertilizer and diesel fuel – the same materials used to build truck bombs. They destroy up to 1,000 vertical feet, dump the resulting rubble into valleys: hauling it away would cut into profits. And while solid mountains are practically inert, pulverised, their rock poisons air; poisons headwater streams flowing through valleys, down to the Mississippi, into the Gulf of Mexico.Top soil and hardwoods? Companies often shun these gifts from nature, bury them as "overburden", standing in the way of getting at coal.

Companies that destroy the world for privatized profits and socialized harm are amoral or immoral. A government that won't protect us from such rogues is complicit. How are we supposed to live without air, without water?

After years, I'm still surprised by the lies. Take Massey spokesman Jeff Gllenwater, who told Peter Slavin, "There's no credible evidence of coal causing cancer." That depends on whom you find credible. I asked Michael Hendryx, at West Virginia University, about Gillenwater's claim. He wrote back:

No credible evidence of coal causing cancer"?  Nonsense.  There is abundant evidence.

Coal contains trace elements of a number of known carcinogens including arsenic, cadmium, chromium, nickel, beryllium, and others.  When coal is processed at local facilities after extraction, these elements enter the local environments in the air and in the water.  Furthermore, particulate matter from air pollution such as that caused by coal mining and processing is a well known cancer risk.  Water and air pollution from coal mining and processing are well established. This is to say nothing of coal combustion, which kills over 20,000 Americans every year from a variety of causes including cancer.

There is also solid epidemiological evidence that cancer death rates are higher in Appalachian mining environments compared to non-mining environments in ways that are NOT explained by smoking, diet, age, or other factors.

In short, there is credible evidence.

Big Coal, though, has money to spread lies, influence policy. Citizens sued to protect our mountains and won under the Clean Water Act, only to have the Bush EPA and Army Corps of Engineers reclassify mining waste as "fill", in 2002 – as if rubble were gravel being used to build bridges across streams.

Since then, we have sued some more, signed petitions, made phone calls, testified at hearings, written letters, travelled hours to meet with officials, appointed and elected – all to stop this stripmining on steroids. Still, the coal industry goes virtually unchecked.

So, yes, thousands went to Washington and marched on 27 September to tell the EPA to do its job. Yes, we continued on to PNC Bank to say stop funding this obliteration. Then, 115 folks sat down in front of the White House, in an act of civil disobedience, accepting arrest, to tell President Obama that, yes, he can do something, if he only will.

Appalachia and its people predate Big Coal. There's still a remnant of "almost heaven" and we're willing to share it. Come visit, educate yourself, join your voice with ours. Otherwise, these mountains will be squandered – not at the end of time, but in less than 20 years.

Note:  thanks to Bo Webb, who encouraged Matt Seaton of the Guardian to solicit a piece from me.  This originally appeared (with British spellings and dating conventions) on October 7 as "Appalachia rises as mining razes mountains."  I've restored Michael Hendrxy's quote in full, as I have no word limit here and I find the ellipses distracting.

Morgan Cain Grim of Floyd County, Virginia on MTR

Illustration compiled from Daniel Shea's "Mountaintop Removal Site" and "West Virginia" in his 2007 series Removing Mountains. While Shea had a grant for that series, he is holding a print sale to fund Plume, his current photographs of Southeast Ohio and "its unusually dense concentration of coal-fired power plants."

*

I wrote on July 10 about the 5' by 3' poster at a Prestonburg, Kentucky golf course, featuring a semi-nude photograph of Ashley Judd. Accompanying the photograph was the slogan,

Ashley makes a living removing her top. Why can't coal miners?

By permission, I'm publishing here the poem "Topless," in which Morgan Cain Grim of Floyd, VA. Morgan examined the comparison of topless women to topless mountains back in 2009. For more information on Grim, see the bottom of this post.

*

TOPLESS (Listen along as Grim reads her poem here)

I read quickly as his car sped by…
curious what token he offered the world,
what statement defined him enough to brand his vehicle.
Squinting, I made out the small words on his bumper sticker:
I LIKE MY MOUNTAINS LIKE
I LIKE MY WOMEN: TOPLESS

The car sped off into the distance, but the slogan did not.
It stayed with me. Lingering. Repeating. Stuck.
Taking me back to a sad day.
A field trip unlike childhood years
with packed lunch and souvenir money.
The day I saw a mountain decapitated.
Invaded. Stripped. Topless.

With a stab to my chest, I dissected the words:
Topless mountain. Topless woman.
But no sensual silhouette would come to mind.
No ripened breasts, exposed, and proud.
Instead, a woman, in mourning like the mountain.
With shameful scars in place of breasts.
Wounds: Exposed. Abashed.
Where cancer had spared her life, but stolen her bosom.
Invaded. Stripped. Topless.

Is this what the driver meant?

The words were branded on my skin like his bumper.
Even though his car was infinitely distant from me…
As distant as roots feel, ripped from their earth.
As distant as babes feel, weaned from the nipple.
As distant as the woman and the mountain
from nature’s intentions.

All I thought of was the woman, the mountain.
All I felt was their shame. A victim’s shame.
Unjustly felt. Unjustly suffered.
I stared into her, I stared unto the mountain.
My eyes trying to apologize.

Her eyes stared back…
telling me how it once was.
How the bare chest she clutched once nursed babes.
How her breasts gave strength to precious little lives.
How she once knew herself through them,
part of her distinct shape, femininity, identity.
How she never knew she loved them…
never knew she would be without them.

The mountain, too, stared back at me…
speaking the wisdom of a timeless elder.
Tales of changes and seasons. Life and death.
Animal, tree, rock, fern.
The springs of life that once flowed abundantly.
The billions of years spent climbing, moving.
So slowly that man could not notice.
The infinite, patient journey since creation.

They stared back at me.
Telling me how it would never again be.
Of what was forever severed.
Irreversible. Irreplaceable. Gone.
Invaded. Stripped. Topless.

I stared. I listened. I cried.
Heavy tears turned to cleansing flood,
baptizing my stained conscience.
And then…I knew.
I LOVE MY MOUNTAINS LIKE
I LOVE MY WOMEN: SHAMELESS
Healthy. Vivacious. Proud.
A new slogan branded to my soul!
A new song for you, woman,
a new ballad for you, mountain:

Woman, you survived.
Live shameless. Live assured
of tomorrow’s cure.
Mountain, live to see
God’s glory restore man’s rape.
For long before draglines,
there lived prophets, proclaiming:
“The Lord’s house shall be established
on the top of the mountains!”

You survived. You breathe.
And with all the life left in you,
You strive. You fight.
You live.
To see a future
with no more
Invaded. Stripped. Topless.

*

About the poet

Grim was a senior majoring in interdisciplinary studies at Virginia Tech when "Topless" won first prize in the Steger Award for undergraduate poetry on April 24, 2009. Here's a picture of her accepting the award, standing along side poet Nikki Giovanni, who administered the award and University President Charles Steger, who funded it.

A honors graduate, Grim, while at Tech, also introduced Appalachian culture to Spain, and eventually brought Spanish gospel back to its African-American roots. While at Tech she also interviewed members of Wakefield, an African-American community in preparation for publishing her 350-page honors thesis: "“Wake Forest: Voices That Tell of a Faith Community.”

Endnote: the poster and permission

So, what about the unnamed person who funded the poster of Judd? Did s/he appropriate a work of art without permission or credit? I've written Caroline Noseworthy, a representative for the photographer, Ruven Afanador, to try and find out. If I hear back, I'll update this post.

Jul 17, 2010, 3:19 PM

Folks are speculating that the semi-nude photograph of Ashley Judd used in the 5' by 3' poster on a golf course in Kentucky is the one taken by Ruven Afanador for the 2006 Marie Claire story by Lucy Kaylin, "Ashley Judd: The Good Fight: As the global ambassador of Youth AIDS, actress Ashley Judd has stepped into the role of a lifetime: a knowledgeable, caring, committed crusader hell-bent on making a
difference."

According to a contemporaneous story, the cover is this one which appears to be similar to this one which accompanied the web version of the article.

I'm wondering if you can tell me if Mr. Afanador still holds rights to the picture, and if not, who does. If he does retain rights, did the anonymous funder of the poster obtained permision from Mr. Afanador to use the image?

An a hat tip for the recording

Thanks go to Mimi Pickering (email) of Appalshop who sent a link to a recording of the poem after WMMT posted an audio file posted July 8, 2010, while we were discussing the brouhaha on the Appalnet email list.

Langston Hughes and the Real Harlem Renaissance

Pastel drawing of Hughes by Winold Reiss (bio) via the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Modern American Poetry series entry on Hughes.  I first published this post on August 24, 2009 and updated it on December 5, 2013, after I found an illustrated version of the poem, "Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria" and a recording of Hughes reading "Big Buddy." There is so much additional information now available on Langston Hughes and his  radicalism that I will be writing a second post.

~

Since I wasn't born yet during the thirties, when I heard the term "Harlem Renaissance" it merely conjured the idea of artistic revival. But it's obvious from the following poem and Hughes's central role in its history that the Renaissance was a lot more about rage and revolution than I had thought. 


Advertisement For The Waldorf-Astoria by Langston Hughes

Fine living . . . a la carte?
Come to the Waldorf-Astoria!

LISTEN HUNGRY ONES!
Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the
new Waldorf-Astoria:

"All the luxuries of private home. . . ."
Now, won't that be charming when the last flop-house
has turned you down this winter?
Furthermore:
"It is far beyond anything hitherto attempted in the hotel
world. . . ." It cost twenty-eight million dollars. The fa-
mous Oscar Tschirky is in charge of banqueting.
Alexandre Gastaud is chef. It will be a distinguished
background for society.
So when you've no place else to go, homeless and hungry
ones, choose the Waldorf as a background for your rags--
(Or do you still consider the subway after midnight good
enough?)

ROOMERS
Take a room at the new Waldorf, you down-and-outers--
sleepers in charity's flop-houses where God pulls a
long face, and you have to pray to get a bed.
They serve swell board at the Waldorf-Astoria. Look at the menu, will
you:

GUMBO CREOLE
CRABMEAT IN CASSOLETTE
BOILED BRISKET OF BEEF
SMALL ONIONS IN CREAM
WATERCRESS SALAD
PEACH MELBA

Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
Why not?
Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of
your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers
because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed gar-
ments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends
and live easy.
(Or haven't you had enough yet of the soup-lines and the bit-
ter bread of charity?)
Walk through Peacock Alley tonight before dinner, and get
warm, anyway. You've got nothing else to do.

~

I might have figured that Hughes was involved in rage and revolution, given the central role he is given by the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC, which  celebrates poetry of "witness and provocation" and calls poets to "a greater role in public life."  The festival takes its name from  a line from Hughes's poem “Big Buddy” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (p.240).

....Hey Big Buddy,
Don’t you hear this hammer ring?
I’m gonna split this rock
and split it wide!
And when I split this rock,
stand by my side


Bus Boys and Poets, a restaurant/bookstore/performance space/community center for progressives, founded in the U Street neighborhood of Washington, DC in 2005 by activist, artist and restaurateur Andy Shallal also takes its name from a reference to Hughes's life.  Shallal named his business  in honor of Hughes, who (like Duke Ellington and Thurgood Marshall) lived in the neighborhood. Hughes had worked as a busboy in the 1930s at the Wardman Park Hotel (about two miles to the West off of Rock Creek Parkway) , prior to gaining recognition as a poet and then moving to Harlem. Poet Kwame Alexander has a piece on Hughes in DC on the site Beltway Poets.

~

Scott Fowler agrees with me about the connection between radicalism and the Harlem Rennaissance:

The Harlem Renaissance marks the point when blacks began to stop denying the
blackness inside themselves and began denying the god that put their race through great trial and tribulations. Langston Hughes was at the forefront of this involvement. He understood that it didn't matter what others thought of the Negro experience. He knew that as long as blacks embraced their heritage, and took pride from it, society could be changed.

In fact, "Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria" first appeared as a mock advertisement, with illustrations Walter Steinhilber in the December 1931 edition of  New Masses. You can read the entire poem in 1994 hardcover version of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (p. 143).  It's also available online in a selection advertising the 1995 paperback edition
here.

(UPDATE:  I found this illustrated version on the site for the exhibition Grand Hotel produced for the Vancouver Art Gallery, which was open to the public from April 13 - September 15, 2013.)

~

I'm guessing that this poem may have been suppressed during the Cold War, just as the terser poem, "Goodbye Christ." Joshua Good "Advertisement" so I'll have to read  Arnold Rampersad (website, bio)'s  Life of Langston Hughes (Oxford University Press--Volume I: 1902-1941: I, Too, Sing America (1986),Volume II: 1941-1967: I Dream a World (1988).


In an January 2009 article in Poetry Magazine "On Newly Discovered Langston Hughes Poems,"
Rampersad talks about the suppression of Hughes in general:

By the end of 1933, in the depths of the crisis, he had composed some of the harshest political verse ever penned by an American. These pieces include "Good Morning Revolution" and "Columbia," but above all, "Goodbye Christ." Here the speaker of the poem ridicules the legend of Jesus in favor of the radical reality of Marx, Lenin, "worker," "peasant," "me." Around 1940, under severe pressure from conservatives, Hughes repudiated "Goodbye Christ" as an unfortunate error of his youth. However, in 1953 he was again forced to condemn this poem when he appeared, by subpoena, before Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous subcommittee probing allegedly "un-American" activities by some of our leading scholars, scientists, and artists. At his core, Hughes was a lyric poet entranced by the charms and mysteries of nature. Nevertheless, political protest was a key aspect of his writing virtually from his high-school days, when many of his classmates were the children of Jewish and Catholic immigrants from Europe who taught him the importance of protesting against injustice. A stirring voyage to colonial Africa in 1923, when he was barely twenty-one, only intensified his commitment to protest art.

Hughes certainly suffered right wing propaganda against him, as this flyer by Huey Long buddy Gerald L.K. Smith and publisher of The Flag and the Cross illustrates:

The flyer also points to how ferment on the right is nothing new. (In case any of my younger readers have not read about the McCarthy hearings or missed my post on Cointelpro.)

I'm not sure why his political poems were "newly discovered" since Hughes explains the genesis of "Advertisement" in his autobiography The Big Sea (1940, reissued by Hill and Wang in 1993):

In the midst of that depression, the Waldorf-Astoria opened. On the way to my friend's home on Park Avenue I frequently passed it, a mighty towering structure looming proud above the street, in a city where thousands were poor and unemployed. So I wrote a poem about it called "Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria," modeled after an ad in Vanity Fair announcing the opening of New York's greatest hotel. (Where no Negroes worked and none were admitted as guests.)

The hotel opened at the very time when people were sleeping on newspapers in doorways, because they had no place to go. But suites in the Waldorf ran into thousands a year, and dinner in the Sert Room was ten dollars! (Negroes, even if they had the money, couldn't eat there. So naturally, I didn't care much for the Waldorf-Astoria.)

Hughes also wrote essays, including one of my favorites, "Are You Spanish," published in the Chicago Defender (September 18, 1943--see page 50 of Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62, U. of Illinois Press, 1995, edited by Christopher C. De Santis of Illinois State (his webpage).

In that essay, Hughes, suggested that students demand to be served in train dining cars as they returned to college in the South:

If you have to raise sand to eat there, then raise sand. Be firm and logical about it. Don't use bad language. Don't threaten. Simply say you are an American.

*

Here's the Moses Asch (bio) recording from 1945  of Hughes reading the poem  "Big Buddy," which inspired the name for the Split This Rock poetry festival.   (starting at 4:25).  Asch also recorded much of Woodie Guthrie and went on to found Folkway Records in 1948.

SHANNON WAMSLEY TALKS ABOUT THE SAGO MINE DISASTER

When the lightning strikes I shatter Elton’s coffee cup.
The moon new, Venus visible this week
I’d been staring out across the black, rinsing breakfast dishes.

Lightning’s queer in January here. I’d never
seen the likes of such, race down to the mine,
my mind a-swirl like the Buckhannon River.

Elton stands there, face black, but safe and sound.
I’m bound to joke, say some trite thing
about our lives cheating the blast,

when Elton’s face goes slack. Anna, last of the wives
comes up crying. Elton tries some small
comfort, sharing a word of hope he’s heard.

I realize her Randy’s still trapped and my own heart
goes cold inside my quilted vest, Christmas plunder
coal wage-bought. “The wages of sin” comes to mind.

I try to shake the thought, but how?
I have my husband. The others wait.
How can you sort happiness from guilt?

*

Guilt and thanks--what if it had been a normal day? His crew
waited ten minutes for a buggy big enough to take them in.
Ten minutes, I hear Elton say, he’d have been round that turn.

Ten minutes, he’d been trapped inside.
Ten minutes, I’d be waiting with the other wives
Ten minutes, if it had been a normal day.

*

Elton says when it starts getting hot, he never does see fire.
Just hears this roar and feels a rushing wind.
Heat and soot, dust and smoke keep coming

clammy air where you can’t make out your hand or breathe.
Monitors beep and blink and men fear they’re fixed to die and
all the time, this rushing wind. He says you feel your way along.

*

Sitting in his truck holding vigil, I can’t help but
fit my pinky to the hollow of his cheek. At two a.m-- I
must have nodded off--

I wake a-shiver, not from cold, but from
how long the other wives
must wait and wonder.

In the dim light a sliver of moon provides,
I stare as Elton snores, for a moment deep in sleep.
I used to fret when his noise would wake me up.


*

The illustration is from the Farmer's Almanac. That's what the moon looked like by January 3, 2000. The poem is the one I sent yesterday to Verbal Events, the quarterly compilation of poems in progress by those of us who studied with Bill Stafford back in 1985 at Atlantic Center for the Arts.. Francine Sterle had kind things to say about the poem when she received it and since I admire her work,, I thought I'd go ahead and post the poem, along with the discussion I sent her. Feel free to chime in on the discussion.

*

I tried to capture a sense of the protagonist from the interview she did, along with her husband, on CNN. "Plunder" is an old-time regional usage, she didn't use. Nor did she use "fret". Hope the perfect iambic pentameter of the last line didn't go over the edge. Had to imagine a few details--the kitchen scene, the truck scene, of course, which makes me wonder about using her name. On the other hand, not using seems like theft. Your thoughts?


*

Of course, Eliot would have recommended theft, I suppose, but, he's not such a nice fellow. As Virginia Wolf said of him to Roger Fry, May 18, 1923:

That strange figure Eliot dined here last night. I feel that he has taken the veil, or whatever monks do...Tom, though infinitely considerate [of his
wife], is also perfectly detached. His cell, is I'm sure, a very lofty one, but
a little chilly. We have the oddest conversations: I can't help loosing some
figure of speech, which Tom pounces on and utterly destroys.

Another curmudgeon than Eliot, but one who wrote more plainly, said something funnier about him. This from Robert Frost, as reported in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, pg. 321 (1940)

Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences. We are both poets and we both like to play. That's the similarity. The difference is this: I like to
play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist.

Here's a story about Frost's dark side in the lengthy article which our beloved Bill Stafford wrote August 18, 1974, entitled "The Terror of Robert Frost, which the New York Times republished April 25, 1999.

Lesley Frost has told about a midnight scene when she as a child awoke to find her father waving a revolver toward her mother, and threatening: "Take your choice. Before morning, one of us will be dead."

Bill also recounted the "Eucher" story, but attributes it as follows:

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant in her "Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence" reports one such utterance: "Know what the difference is between me and T.S. Eliot? I play euchre. He plays Eucharist. We both play."

Bill also has something to�say about Frost'steaching, which might be of interest to those of us who studied with Stafford or read his books on creative writing.

Frost's poetic unorthodoxy had a direct link to his unorthodoxy in the classroom. "Don't work -- worry," he said to his students. He dreaded grading. He often urged students to buckle down less. He tried tagging students with their grades on the first day of class, an then allowing them to come in to persuade him, if they could, to change the grade. He asked if students wanted papers returned, and if they hesitated he swept the papers into the wastebasket.

When forced to give a final exam at the University of Michigan, Frost simply asked his students to write down what they had got from the course. Later, he reported to a friend that one student said he hadn't gotten a damned thing out of the course and that the student had received a B. Asked why not an A, Frost
said the student misspelled "damned."

In his book "Robert Frost Speaks," Daniel Smythe cites many Frost utterances that revealed the poet's cavalier attitude toward teaching and toward "the rules." For instance, Frost did not believe in investigating something in order to write about it:

You know, we don't need to be original or inventive. You don't need to find
new things. Just take the old things you find about you, the things people have
known all their lives, and say them with your style." Nor did he believe that
poetry should be studied: "You go to school to learn to read. The further you go
the more you have the attitude that everything is to study. That is the danger.
Once a person has learned to read, once he has gotten the flavor of it, he
should just let it rest.

Years earlier when he had begun to teach, he had written on the board what identifies that attitude:

To be read -- to be enjoyed. Not studied -- not skimmed.

Poems for the First 100 Days

Official portrait of President Obama by Pete Souza.

Check out Starting Today: poems for the first 100 days. Poets Arielle Greenberg (email) of Belfast, Maine and Rachel Zucker (email) of NYC are posting post a new poem by a contemporary American poet—a poem written for and during the first 100 days of the Obama administration.

Wendell Berry: Speech Against the State Government (and MTR)

Portrait of Wendell Berry by Robert Shetterly for his project, Americans Who Tell the Truth.

Poet and essayist Wendell Berry was the big draw for a breakfast this morning at the Society of Environmental Journalist's final day of conferencing at the Hotel Roanoke. He chose to read his "Speech Against the State Government" first delivered on February 14, 2008 at the "I Love Mountains" protest in Frankfort, Ky.

Mr. Berry said during the reading that it was okay to reprint it, so I give it to you here in full. Here, too, after you finish reading is Mark Engler's piece from Grist on the occasion of Mr. Berry's seventieth birthday, August 5, 2004.

*

Speech Against the State Government

In 1996, when Ellen Davis, a scholar of the Bible at Duke Divinity School, was taken to a mountaintop removal site in Kentucky, she remembered Jeremiah:

I have seen the mountains, and here, they are wavering, and all the hills palpitate. I have seen, and here, there is no human being, and all the birds of the heavens have fled. I have seen, and here, the garden-land is now the wasteland . . .

If you take seriously the knowledge that humans are capable of neighborliness and caretaking, are capable of caring well for the earth for the earth’s own sake and for the sake of their neighbors now and yet to come, and if you know that according to our greatest teachers this neighborliness is expected of us, then you will grieve in knowing that we humans are destroying the earth. You will be offended in knowing that we are doing so with governmental approval and with governmental encouragement. If you are at all a normal human, you will find that hard to swallow. You may find it, in fact, a putrid lump that will gag you somewhat before you can get it down.

And yet to Kentucky state government, a wholly owned subsidiary of the coal corporations and of any other corporations that bid high enough, earth destruction is a normal economic enterprise. Earth destruction by strip mining has been an officially accepted practice in the eastern Kentucky coal fields for nearly half a century. In the Knott County Court room on the night of July, 15, 1965, confronting, as he had and would, the already catastrophic damage of strip mining that was going to get worse, Harry Caudill spoke of “the gleeful yahoos who are destroying the world, and the mindless oafs who abet them.”

Forty-three years later, bad has come to worse, and worse has come to worst, the gleeful yahoos still reign supreme in the coal fields, and the mindless oafs who abet them still hold dominion in Frankfort. This is not because money talks, as Sen. Mitch McConnell seems to think. It is because money votes, and money buys people who vote. It is because might, with enough money, does not have to worry about right. It is because, in the magnetic field of money, the flags and crosses on certain political lapels turn into price tags.

I must hurry to say that I am not talking about all Kentucky politicians. There has always been in this capitol a “saving remnant” of women and men who are not for sale. It is because of those people that we, the powerless, have never yielded to despair, but have continued to come here with the hope that at last this government will see the truth and do its duty.

Over the last forty years, with other powerless people, I have been here many times. We have come, moneyless into the magnetic field of money, trying to stop the mindless destruction of the land and people of our state. We have made our protests and our arguments, presented our facts, appeared before committees, spoken to those willing to speak to us. And virtually always we have failed. The destruction has continued. Nothing has changed.

Newly reminded of our political nonentity, we have gone home to await another chance to try again. Meanwhile the destruction has gone on. When I return from one of these tours of the capitol, if the Kentucky River is raised and running, I can see the land of our mountain counties flowing past my house. And I know that that river, vital to the future of our state and its economy, is seriously impaired at its headwaters and degraded in all its length by pollutants, and that the most powerful among us simply do not care.

What are we to do? Well, to begin with, there is no “we” that I can confidently speak for. I have been speaking for myself so far, and I will continue to do so.

Human nature, which I fully share, tells me that in the face of great violence it is easy to think of retaliatory violence. I reject that entirely. I do not believe in violence as in any sense a solution to any problem. I am willing also to take the further step into Scripture and say that we should love our enemies – or at least act toward them as if we love them.

The next temptation is to do as our enemies do, to say, “If they do it, so must we.” And I have in fact spent some time on the argument, which can be logically made, that Kentucky conservationists ought to start a fund drive and apply for grants in order to buy our fair share of state government. I reject that also. Even a good cause cannot justify dirty politics.

But thinking of that argument, I convinced myself of a proposition that is more difficult: If current governmental practice affords no apparent recourse but to become as corrupt as your opponents, you have got to become more radical.

Kentucky conservationists are not the first people to have to confront their own helplessness before an alien government. Others have done so, and you know some of their names. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are two of them; there have been many others. Their solution to the problem of powerlessness is to make of powerlessness a power. The name of this solution is non-violent resistance or insistence, including civil disobedience. If your government will not rise to the level of common decency, if it will not deal fairly, if it will not protect the land and the people, if it will not fully and openly debate the issues, then you have to get in the government’s way. You have to forbid it to ignore you. You have to provide it with two new choices: either it must grant you the consideration that it rightfully owes you, or it must expose itself openly as a government not representative of the people but owned by the privileged few.

And here yet another temptation asserts itself. Why not wait until our cause becomes vivid and urgent enough, and our side numerous enough, to vote our opponents out of office? Why not be patient?

My own answer is that while we are being patient, more mountains, forests, and streams, more people’s homes and lives, will be destroyed in the Appalachian coal fields. Are 400,000 acres of devastated land, and 1,200 miles of obliterated streams not enough? This needs to be stopped. It does not need to be “regulated.” As both federal and state governments have amply shown, you cannot regulate an abomination. You have got to stop it.

Speaking for myself still, I will say that I don’t like the idea of resorting to non-violent obstruction, and I don’t feel very brave about it. It involves more time and trouble than I want to donate; the penalties can be unpleasant, and they can be much worse than that. Furthermore, as I am now out of patience with useless protesting and lobbying, I have no interest in useless civil disobedience. You are not going to catch me making a merely symbolic gesture. But I began my opposition to strip mining on that July night in the Knott County court room in 1965. I have been patient for forty-three years. And there are now enough of us who are concerned – there are enough of us here today – to require our government either to accept its responsibility or, publicly, and to its everlasting disgrace, refuse to do so. Surely the members of this government who represent coal corporations will be impressed by the tenfold increase in our numbers from February 14, 2007. Surely they will notice, more to their dismay, that many of this increase are young people.

If this General Assembly and this Administration give notice as usual that they are blind by policy to the ongoing destruction of the land and the people they are sworn to protect – and if you, my friends, all other recourse having failed, are ready to stand in the way of this destruction until it is stopped – then I too am ready.

Sharon Olds

Photograph by Eamonn McCabe accompanied the July 26 Guardian article, "Olds' worlds" by Marianne Macdonald.

I like Olds's poems quite a lot, ever since reading the Gold Cell (Knopf, 1987), especially the chilling poem, "I Go Back to May 1937 " which I've reprinted below. A measure of that poem's impact can be found in the use of an image from that poem for the title of her collected works through 2002, Strike Sparks(Knopf, 2004).

You can find other of Olds's poems online at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's terrific resource, Modern American Poetry, as well as at her exhibit at the Adademy of American Poets. Olds had wanted to come to Split This Rock Poetry Festival, but ill health at the time prevented her.

I was glad to see "Olds' worlds" in The Guardian (see link accompanying her picture above) , but Mcdonald's introduction strikes me as odd, starting with the hype that "many regard" Olds as "America's greatest living poet." Why let the knowledgeable reader debate the list of "greatest living" rather than concentrate on Olds. I'm not sure about which Marianne Macdonald wrote this piece, as it's a common name and there might be several candidates.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Split This Rock Poetry Festival

Sonia Sanchez at Bus Boys and Poets, and Martin Espada, Ethelbert Miller, Naomi Shihab Nye (pictured above) and Alix Olson at Bell Multicultural High School. Quite the lineup. I walked over to the latter w. Steve, who lives in the city. Interestingly he was talking about a poet who's work impressed him and it turned out to be Diane Gilliam. Adrianne Rich could not attend but sent a letter and a poem. Sam Hammill had had a series of minor heart attacks, so likewise.

This one by Naomi Shihab Nye earned a standing ovation:

Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: If
anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, Please come to the
gate immediately.

Well — one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. "Help,"
said the flight service person. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her
the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this."

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. "Shu dow-a, shu- biduck
habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, Sho bit se-wee?"

The minute she heard any words she knew — however poorly used – She
stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso
for some major medical treatment the Following day. I said "No, no, we’re fine,
you’ll get there, just late, Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him."

We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her — SouthWest.

She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.

Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found
out of course they had ten shared friends!

Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian Poets I
know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions.

Soon after, she pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered
sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — out of her bag and was
offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a Sacrament.
The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from
Laredo — we were all covered with the same
powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free (non-alcoholic beverages from huge
coolers and the two little girls for our flight--one African
American, one Mexican American — ran around serving us all Apple Juice and
Llemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.

And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands – had a
potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry
leaves. Ah, an old country traveling tradition: always carry a plant. Always
stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, "This is the
world I want to live in. The shared world."

Not a single person in this gate — once the crying of confusion stopped – was
apprehensive about any other person.

They took to the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.

Not everything is lost.

~




And this one by Martín Espada is the title poem from a collection of the same name:


Imagine the Angels of Bread

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.